The cool history behind Igloo’s ice chests
Millions of Texans anticipate heading to wild and not-so-wild destinations as Memorial Day holiday weekend approaches, a stunning diversity of outdoor-related activities and recreation on their collective agendas.
Fishing. Hiking. Camping. Boating. Picnicking. Maybe just a backyard cookout, or a long drive to visit relatives or friends. Maybe an early trip to the deer hunting lease to begin work on food plots or just spend time afield.
The gear they bring with them will reflect this great range of outdoor recreation. But almost every one of them will share one item, a piece of equipment so universal and almost requisite to just about every outdoors activity that its presence and importance often is taken for granted: the ice chest.
Those portable insulated containers, usually made of hard plastic, range in size from just big enough for a half-dozen cans or bottles of liquid refreshment to gigantic enough to hold a field-dressed, 200pound feral hog or enough food and other perishables to sustain a family of four for a week.
“Ice chests” are what those of us of a certain age learned to call them. “Coolers” is the later-arriving term most-used today. Whatever they are called, these insulated containers have become an almost indispensable item for almost all outdoor recreation and a lot more.
While their primary function for outdoors recreation is to keep drinks, perishable foods, fish and game fresh using ice packed inside, coolers also serve as seat, table, footstool and weatherproof storage container, among other uses.
Today, it would be tough to find a home in Texas that doesn’t have at least one stashed in the garage. Not much more than a half-century ago, it would have been equally hard to find one in any Texas home. Such coolers didn’t exist.
Filling a niche
A business that began in Houston in the wake of World War II played a huge role in making ice chests a ubiquitous piece of gear for outdoors recreation, so much so that that the company’s name has become so synonymous with coolers that it’s often used as a generic term for all such containers.
When Igloo Products Corporation began in 1947, it was a Houston metalworking shop, making products mostly for the state’s oil and gas industry. The first product with the Igloo name was aimed at addressing a constant need in the oil patch: cool drinking water.
Roughnecking and other manual labor under the brutal Texas sun is hard, thirsty work, and a supply of potable water is a constant crucial need. For decades, oil field worksite drinking water came out of wooden barrels hauled in wagons or, later, trucks.
Campers, hikers, hunters, anglers and others often carried their water in bags made of canvas, flax or other fabric, usually hanging them from the hood ornament of their vehicles where, when saturated with water, evaporative cooling kept water inside the water bags as much as 20 degrees cooler than the outside temperature.
Neither was a particularly effective, durable or hygienic way to have water handy.
In 1947, Igloo began building water coolers made of galvanized metal. The round cans, holding 5-15 gallons of water, were insulated and had a snugfitting metal and pushbutton spout. They were a tough, durable, portable and perfect answer to providing a supply of drinking water. And if a chunk of ice — at the time much less generally available than today — was placed inside, the cans kept that water cool throughout the work day.
By the mid-1950s, Igloo’s galvanized metal water coolers were omnipresent at worksites and sat in holding racks on work trucks, barges, work boats and anywhere workers didn’t have access to water from a pipe.
Ice chests were the natural progression from water coolers.
Ice, long available almost exclusively from ice making businesses, was becoming more commonly available in the 1950s. Leaps in technology made for wider manufacture, distribution and storage of ice for retail sale.
Igloo began manufacturing metal-skinned ice chests in the 1950s, and they were welcomed by Texans and other Americans as the culture became more mobile. The portable metal chests gave campers, anglers, hunters and others a way to bring perishable foods afield and keep liquids cold.
The big change — the explosion of coolers — came in the early 1960s.
“Two things happened in the early 1960s,” Brian Garofalow, director of marketing and ecommerce for Igloo Products Corporation, said this week as he stood in a newly opened 3,700-square-foot Igloo Store at the company’s sprawling headquarters and manufacturing site just outside Katy. “Plastics and the Interstate Highway System.”
The Interstate Highway System, begun in the Eisenhower Administration, was rapidly expanding its network of superhighways across the country, triggering a flood of automobile travel as getting from Point A to Point B became much easier. Long driving trips to visit relatives or to camp in state or national parks, or to fish some of the new reservoirs that were popping up across the landscape became commonplace.
Folks making those trips wanted to bring food and drink for the trip. They needed ice chests.
In the early 1960s, development of the technology for injection molding of plastics opened doors for a world of new products. Igloo was one of the first to apply it to making coolers.
Icing the competition
Igloo built its first all-plastic coolers in 1961. It was not the only business to do so, but the company has been the nation’s largest maker of durable, portable ice chests, water coolers and associated products.
Estimates are that Igloo-made coolers account for almost half of the hardsided coolers sold in the U.S. It builds almost 20 million a year.
The company now has more than 90 models of hard-sided ice chests. Those metal water coolers from the 1950s have been replaced by Igloos’ orange and red plastic models, and they are just as ubiquitous at worksites as their silvery ancestors.
About 95 percent of Igloo’s hard-sided coolers are made in the United States, almost all of them at the 1.3 million-squarefoot headquarters/manufacturing/distribution center spread over more than 100 acres just outside Katy.
Igloo’s most recent entry into its mind-boggling line of coolers isn’t yet built in at the Katy site. But, like Igloos’ long string of innovative and trendsetting products, it is drawing serious attention.
This past month, Igloo introduced the nation’s first biodegradable cooler. Its Recool coolers are made of a combination of fiber pulp and paraffin and look like a fiber egg carton. The 16-quart Recool cooler is sturdy, able to hold as much as 75 pounds, and will hold ice for as long as 12 hours, Garofalow said. It’s reusable; simply empty ice/water from the cooler, let it air-dry, and it’s good to go again.
The Recool coolers are billed as an environmentally responsible option for folks looking for an inexpensive, durable, limited-use cooler not made of expanded or extruded polystyrene foam.
Those “Styrofoam” coolers, while inexpensive, have several downsides. Most are fragile, cracking or shedding chunks of lid or sides when dropped or bumped or otherwise seeing rough treatment. Also, the polystyrene foam material is not biodegradable. And it floats.
Discarded or lost polystyrene can be an environmental problem, with the lightweight foam a common sight in wrack lines in waterways. Products made of expanded or extruded polystyrene have been prohibited in some areas and by some local governments for this reason.
Positive response
The Recool coolers aren’t the equal of Igloo’s hard-sided ice chests, which can last for years, if not decades. But they fit the needs of people looking for a lightweight, portable, reasonably durable cooler with a limited lifespan, and one that’s biodegradable when that lifetime ends. At about $9, the Recool coolers are a bit more expensive than the lowest-end polystyrene coolers, which can cost as little as $3 but usually run $5-$10.
Igloo introduced the Recool coolers first through REI stores, but the biodegradable coolers now are showing up at other retail locations. And a larger version is in the works.
“The response to the Recool has been hugely positive,” Igloo’s Garofalow said. “It fits a need.”
That’s pretty much the history and story of Igloo coolers. And it’s why almost every home, boat, deer lease, campsite, picnic table, backyard barbecue, beach gathering or just about any other outdoor recreation activity includes an ice chest/ cooler of some sort.